On the surface, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop seems relatively simple. However, it’s a deceptively complex poem. Is she really talking about the forgetfulness of old age? Or even about never getting to return to a foreign city she once loved? Maybe she is, and maybe she isn’t.

Bishop graduated from Vassar College and was friends with a number of writers in her adult life, including Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Bishop had an inheritance from her father so she was able to live alone and travel extensively. In 1951 she took a trip to Brazil and ended up living there for the next 15 years with her partner. When her partner committed suicide in 1967, Bishop returned to the States. Later in life she taught at Harvard, NYU, and MIT. She met her second partner in 1971 and lived with her until Bishop’s death in 1979.

Regarding the poem “One Art,” I want to leave you with two things to think about as you listen. First, this poem is written in villanelle form. This form originated in France, and has a lot of rules about pace, rhythm, and rhyme that make it complicated to write in English. Poets don’t use forms like the villanelle randomly, and I think there’s something significant about the casual vocabulary of “One Art” being expertly molded into such a rigid structure as the villanelle.

Second, and this is a person interpretation of the poem, I think “One Art” goes beyond the loss of things and experiences. I think this poem is about losing memories. To me, that is true loss – to not even know something (or someone) was there in the first place. And if you listen closely to “One Art,” I think you’ll understand why I read the poem this way.

“The Law of Life” by Jack London is an interesting take on growing old and a perspective on the realities of life, up to and including death.

Jack London is an interesting fellow. His mom moved to California when she was a young woman. She was a music teacher, and claimed to channel an Indian chief, and London’s dad was probably an astrologer his mom was living with at the time she got pregnant. After London’s mom refused to have an abortion, the dad took off. Mom tried to kill herself (unsuccessfully) and then turned over newborn Jack to another woman to raise for a while until after she married John London.

At nine years old, he started reading poetry and prose on his own at the local library. At 17 he hired on as a sailor to Japan. After he returned he worked at a jute mill for a while, then became a hobo, traveling across the whole U.S.

THEN he went to high school in Oakland. At 20 years old he spent a whole summer studying and passed the entrance exam to UC Berkeley, his dream school.

Jack London knew nothing about his astrologer dad until he was in his 20s and a student at Berkeley, where he learned about the astrologer guy from an old newspaper clipping of his mom’s suicide attempt. Of course, he wrote to the guy. Unfortunately, the astro-dad claimed, mom slept around. And the astrologer was impotent. So never write this address again.

At this news, Jack London quit college and moved to the Klondike, beginning an long and illustrious literary career.

There’s a ton more about London. He was a socialist, probably a racist, and a self-made money-o-nare. His first marriage was “arranged” by himself and the lady so that they could make some decent kids. London traveled extensively, “borrowed” from others’ works regularly, and drank like a fish. Over the course of his life he contracted scurvy, dysentery, several tropical diseases, and renal failure. The guy’s own life is a story, never mind all the stories he wrote.

]]>http://raereads.com/episode-5-the-law-of-life/feed/0"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop and "The Law of Life" by Jack London"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop and "The Law of Life" by Jack LondonRae Readsno26:42Episode 4: “The Interlopers”http://raereads.com/episode-4-the-interlopers/
Wed, 04 Mar 2015 03:34:14 +0000http://raereads.com/?p=596http://raereads.com/episode-4-the-interlopers/#respondRae"If" by Rudyard Kipling and "The Interlopers" by Saki“If” by Rudyard Kipling and “The Interlopers” by Saki

Quote:

“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

Kipling is a fascinating figure in late Victorian literature. He was born in India, then a British colony, and lived there for his first five years. Later sent to board in England, he spent many years in Britain as a school boy. Kipling returned to India and began working as a journalist, rather than attending University.

As he became established and built an audience as a popular author, he moved to London to continue his writing career. India and England were not his only homes. When Kipling married a woman from the states, he moved with her to Vermont.

Many of Kipling’s works are influenced by place – the flavor, traditions, and customs of places he lived or visited. For more on Kipling, may I suggest reading Just So Stories, a collection for children meant to be read out loud. There’s also a collection called Letters of Rudyard Kipling that sheds light on the author’s thoughts and influences. (From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel is the first volume and is available for free.)

Saki, whose “real life” name is Hector Hugh Monro, was influenced by the work of Rudyard Kipling. He was born in what was then known as British Burma, the son of a British law enforcement officer. His mother died when he was young and Saki was raised by his grandmother and aunts back in Britain.

As an adult, Saki followed in his father’s footsteps and worked a stint in Burma as a law enforcement officer. After catching malaria, he returned to England and began writing. He worked as a journalist on several national newspapers and eventually published a book about the rise of the Russian Empire.

Saki’s short stories are a contrast to the many rules and conventions of high society in his time. They often feature Nature as a prominent, and ruthless, character. The short stories are often dark or disturbing, designed to challenge what Saki saw as the hypocrisies of Edwardian England.

For more by Saki, grab a collection of short stories, which are available in the public domain. An interesting longer work is the book When William Came (free ebook), which was written right before WWI and describes an alternate universe where a German emperor takes over the world. You should also watch Alfred Hitchcock’s take on Saki’s “The Schartz-Metterklume Method” from 1960.

Quote:
“One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.” Francoise Sagan

Poem:
“Messy Room” by Shel Silverstein

Sheldon “Shel” Silverstein was born in 1930 in Chicago and died in 99 in Key West Florida. In the interim, he made himself into a unique writer, cartoonist, songwriter, playwright. He’s best known for his children’s fiction, and poetry written for children, but is also appreciated for his playwriting chops and his black humor.

Silverstein had a reason to be dark – his first wife died before their daughter’s fifth birthday then his daughter died six years later. While Silverstein did remarry and have another child, the deaths of his first wife and child left an indelible mark on the author’s work.

Silverstein is singular because he was also a prolific illustrator – as a GI in the US Army (during the Korean War) he published cartoons in the Pacific Stars and Stripes. He was a lead cartoonist for Playboy in the 60s, during which time he developed a following as a “travel cartoonist,” documenting his visits to interesting and exotic locales. He also knew how to play the guitar and write songs, as evidenced by two Grammys – one for a musical rendition of poems from his anthology Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings and one for writing A Boy Named Sue, a song made popular by Johnny Cash.

Mark Twain is a comedic writing genius and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was his breakthrough piece. Put simply, it’s a story about a man from the East who gets snagged listening to a story told by a man out West.

This story is meant to be read aloud, and with a ridiculous accent. Twain’s grammar and spelling through much of the story force the reader to read in a specific accent, one that highlights the quality of storytelling, even in an unlikely narrator.

Part of what makes the history of this story so interesting is that it was a harbinger of things to come for Twain. Readers of the modern era remember Twain as a writer of great humor, and mostly of very dry humor – his wit is both subtle (because of it’s dryness) and expansive.

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was one of his very first works to make it into the popular culture of the time. We might call this story something of a trend-setting publication for Twain and writers like him because it proved that good stories can come from the simplest and most ridiculous of places.

I personally love this story because it flies in the face of the highbrow notion of “good writing.” This story is written well, is entertaining, and makes a point (although the theme of the story isn’t really the point). What I really get a kick out of is that Twain wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to entertain. This story isn’t about grand humanistic themes or the struggle of man or anything like that. Instead, the story is fun. It is simple fun, pure fun, and it is a fun that is well done, written by one of the masters of American Literature.

Most of Twain’s work is in the public domain and easily found. For more on Twain himself, check out his autobiography, written with Harriet Smith. If you’re interested in reading something beyond Twain’s well-known classics like Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, try the The Bible According to Mark Twain – an irreverent and entertaining take on some of the best known Bible stories. For something serious, read Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Twain’s decades-long project and the book Twain himself considered to be his greatest work.

Well, maybe not complete nonsense, but many of the words are made up. Why does it matter? Because it’s a successfully creepy poem, even though it’s mostly nonsense! Lewis Carroll was like an early Dr. Suess, on a lot more hallucinogenic drugs.

Carroll does a few interesting things with this poem – many of the made-up words imitate old Anglo-Saxon language (sounds a bit like modern day Welsh – lots of Ys) which was a relatively harsh language. That adds to the solemnity and weight of the adventure story.

The rhythm of the poem is purposeful – it’s written in ballad stanza. This kind of meter originated in old folksongs about heroes and quests. So even though we don’t understand many of the words, we understand the meaning and intent just based on the rhythm – this is a story about beating the bad guys.

Carroll is an interesting guy. He wasn’t a writer – he was actually a logician “in real life.” More information on his life and work is available in a biography by Morton Cohen: Lewis Carroll: A Biography.

Has any North American writer managed to write horror quite as well as Edgar Allan Poe? If so, Poe is certainly one of the masters, up there with only a handful of other gifted writers. Today’s story is one of my all-time-favorites, mainly because the narrator sounds so sane…

Published in 1846, “The Cask of Amontillado” is classic Poe because it tells the story from the point of view of the mentally disturbed. Like other Poe stories, readers are dropped right in the middle of an unstable mind, and Poe takes us along for the ride. It was his last short story and one of his best.

The opening line of the story introduces a question for the reader that is still present when the story closes. The question is this: just what did Fortunato say or do that Montresor considered “a step too far”? This question shapes the way we think of the narrator. And how many stories have you read (or heard) where the opening question isn’t answered and the story is still complete.

You’ll hear some words that aren’t common in American English these days:
A “pipe” of wine is a cask of wine that holds 126 gallons. Nitre is a type of salt, it appears in old caverns where water flows (or seeps) and leaves deposits of nitre behind. Mason is either a freemason or someone who works with stone.

]]>http://raereads.com/rae-reads-podcast-episode-2-the-cask-of-amontillado/feed/0"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe; "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe; "Jabberwocky" by Lewis CarrollRae Readsno26:19Episode 1: “A Jury of Her Peers”http://raereads.com/podcast-episode-1-a-jury-of-her-peers/
Thu, 12 Feb 2015 17:57:35 +0000http://raereads.com/?p=573http://raereads.com/podcast-episode-1-a-jury-of-her-peers/#respondRae"A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell and "Without Ceremony" by Thomas HardySomething new! I love listening to audiobooks but often find that my attention wanes after five or six hours. The Rae Reads Podcast is a (shorter) trio of a great quote, a poem, and a short story.

“Short” is, of course, relative. The Episode 1 podcast clocks in at just under an hour! Perfect for a bit of a drive or a walk with the pups. Enjoy!

Thomas Hardy was an English writer born in 1840 and died in 1928. Hardy was inspired by the landscape of his Southern England as well as the rich history of other geographical locations like Waterloo. He was a mentor to other writers including William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound.

Hardy is perhaps most famous for his novels, including Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure. Of poetry, Hardy’s lyric poems are perhaps the best known, especially those written after the death of his first wife, Emma Gifford, with whom he had a tumultuous and troubled relationship.

“Without Ceremony” is a poem Hardy wrote during the years immediately following Emma’s death, between 1912 and 1913, and it refers to his late wife.

More information on Thomas Hardy’s poems can be found at Poetry Foundation dot org.

Susan Glaspell was a Pulitzer Prize –winning American author born in 1876 and died in 1948. She wrote prolifically, composing novels, plays, short stories, and journalism articles. Glaspell was also an actress, writing and acting in some of the first avant-guard plays of the modern American theater.

Glaspell was actually an early feminist writer; one of her best-known works was a play called Trifles, published in 1916. This play is now one of the most anthologized plays in American theater history. In 1932 Glaspell was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the play Allison’s House, written in 1931.

Glaspell’s work was polarizing in her own time, partially because of the feminist themes and strong female characters. After her death, her work fell into relative obscurity for a time. Today, Glaspell is recognized as a major American dramatist and fiction writer.

Today’s story, “A Jury of Her Peers” is the short story adaptation of her play Trifles.

A collection of critical essays on Glaspell’s plays and literary works titled “Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction” is available via The University of Michigan Press.

]]>http://raereads.com/podcast-episode-1-a-jury-of-her-peers/feed/0"A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell and "Without Ceremony" by Thomas Hardy"A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell and "Without Ceremony" by Thomas HardyRae Readsno59:26